Sideways on a Scooter (11 page)

In the morning he ran down to Joginder’s house, full of the enthusiasm of the virtuous. He knocked on the aluminum siding door and presented the bicycle. Joginder was not impressed by the offering.

“I am superintendent. I am not for bicycle, sahib. Even sahib should not have been cycling-trykling.” The most Joginder would deign to do was donate the bike elsewhere. He gave it to the Bihari boys who worked at the local grocery, and for years afterward, I’d see them swinging up onto its thick frame, a canvas bag of supplies slung across a shoulder.

It didn’t take long for word to get around Nizamuddin about the generous foreigner who’d made an unexpected donation. Now when Benjamin walked down to the market, the neighborhood boys would gather around him. There was something in his confident amble and the awe he inspired in the Bihari immigrants that called to mind a movie star. He’d sometimes buy the Nizamuddin guys a round of Thums Up—a harsh Indian-made cola that is considered a manly drink in villages and comes in returnable glass bottles. They’d drink it in companionable silence, standing in the street outside the shop, because the shopkeeper insisted that customers return the bottles right away. One of them would light a bidi, and they would pass it between them like a joint.

In the weeks before he left Delhi, Benjamin talked about how much he would miss the camaraderie he’d established with the neighborhood guys. In spite of their limited interactions, he’d developed a wordless attachment with them, the kind that blooms quickly in South Asia. He was especially enamored with the youngest of the shop delivery boys, Arjun, who was newly arrived from the village and didn’t yet have the dead-eyed cynicism of many of Delhi’s older slum dwellers. When he appeared with the day’s milk and bread, Benjamin tipped him excessively. The affection was mutual, so much so that I dreaded ordering things from the shop after Benjamin left. Arjun would peer hopefully over my shoulder from the doorway, as though hoping my
husband would pop out from behind me in the apartment. When he realized it was just me, he’d pocket the few rupees of my comparatively meager tip and turn back down the stairs, his face bereft.

Everyone says that India desensitizes you to human misery. During my first year in Delhi, I eagerly awaited that change, but it was a long time coming. Just driving through the streets, I routinely felt a low-level sadness that exploded into horror, or even nausea, at the sights around me—limbless beggars, children eating garbage, the desperate abusing the desperate.

During Benjamin’s stay, we went to Mumbai and visited the Haji Ali shrine. Attracted by its whitewashed minarets perched on a tiny islet off the coast, we followed a procession of pilgrims across a long causeway, lined on both sides with supplicants asking for alms. It was a veritable nineteenth-century freak show of misery that reminded me of the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds museum. Among the gallery of beggars sat a bloated balloon of a woman, her body expanded wide with elephantiasis, and a man with a hole in his chest, through which, I swear, you could see his left lung. Stacked in front of each of them were piles of coins—when I looked more closely, I realized they weren’t rupees but paisa coins made of tin. Each coin was worth one-hundredth of a rupee; the donations they’d received probably totaled no more than several American cents. At the end of the causeway, four legless and armless torsos were writhing on the ground. The heads attached to the torsos were chanting fervent prayers to Allah. My own legs were shaking by the time we got up to the mosque, and for years afterward, I wondered how a man can lose all four of his limbs and still survive. The Indian government cites endemic infection, arterial disease, severe burns, traumatic injury, deformity, and paralysis as some of the reasons that ten million people in India have lost limbs.

Geeta instructed me rather harshly that I would have to “get over” my “Western oversensitivity” if I was to live in India. I tried to follow her advice and get better at inuring myself. I learned to skip over the almost daily newspaper articles about traffic accidents and natural disasters—“82
Dead in Bus Mishap”; “Hundreds Washed Away on Flood Plain.” Even with death tolls that would have been front-page news in the United States, these stories were relegated to the inside pages of the Indian papers; there were simply too many of them.

I always read the reports about caste-related violence, though, drawn to the topic with horrified fascination. Not long after I moved to India, the papers got hold of a story about several untouchable villagers in the North Indian state of Haryana. They were leather tanners, a job reserved for the lowest of the low because it involves working with dead cows. The police stopped the men when they were on their way to the market to sell a cow hide, accusing them of killing the cow to tan it, which is illegal in most Indian states. The villagers insisted that the cow had died naturally, but the police brought them in, and rumor spread fast. A mob gathered outside the police department, rushed into the building, and dragged the five men out. They were beaten to death in front of the police department.

The English-language press ran articles with headlines such as “Five Men = One Cow.” Television talk shows pondered whether caste inequality had improved at all in India’s sixty-plus years of independence. One fierce and poetic newspaper op-ed began: “Thanks to my upper caste credentials, I don’t have to skin a dead cow for a living. Nor are my ‘community members’ not allowed to enter temples or stopped from drinking water from village wells, or forced to use a ‘marked’ cup in the local tea-shop, or made to eat human excreta as divine punishment.”

I went to see the journalist who’d written it. Vijay Mukherjee had the brooding look of an aging Marxist—furrowed brow, receding hairline, string bag of books over a shoulder. It’s not an uncommon style in today’s India, where communism remains a potent force in politics and attracts millions of followers. Still, Vijay seemed out of place in the sleek office building in central Delhi where he worked as a senior writer for one of India’s top-selling English-language papers. That impression was only exaggerated when he sat down in front of my microphone and his account of the caste system morphed into a furious hour-and-a-half-long monologue. He worked himself into a sweat in
spite of the air-conditioning, pounding on the table and rendering my radio recording unusable.

The word
caste
, he told me, is actually a conflation of two Indian concepts:
jati
, which describes the community, clan, or tribe that you marry into, and
varna
, the place this group occupies on the hierarchy mandated by Hindu scripture. There are four main
varnas
, topped by the Brahmins—traditionally the teachers and priests—who are followed by the kings and warriors, the merchants and farmers, and the service people. Inside each of these four categories are thousands of
jatis
, or subcastes. And below the lowest category are the untouchables, literally outcastes from the system.

Indian scholars think caste stratification evolved gradually, as the idea of religious purity became central to Hinduism. Unlike Christianity and Islam, Hinduism has no one single canon laying out the principles of the religion. There are books of mythology with morals and stories; for the rules, Hindus turn to the
Manusmrti
(The Laws of Manu) from the first century
B.C
. It records in meticulous, cruel detail the Hindu caste code that came into practice during the Vedic period, from 1500 to 200
B.C
. Manu, the book’s author, was naturally a Brahmin himself, since they were the only educated caste. He is careful to preserve the preeminence of his own tribe in his taxonomy of the social order. The jobs of the untouchables, he says, should include disposing of corpses and carrying out executions; they should wear the clothes of executed convicts and live outside the boundaries of villages.

Manu is still considered the best authority on the social and religious duties of dharma and caste. And although it is not known how closely or widely the rules were followed in his era, it is indisputable that he formalized caste divisions. Today’s Hindu marriage code is still based on his principles. Then, when the British took over India, they only entrenched the caste system further. The British slotted the educated Brahmins into the colonial institution to serve as imperial bureaucrats and religious advisors to judges.

When Mahatma Gandhi launched a long-overdue movement to reform the caste system, in the 1920s, he linked the issue to the bid for
India’s independence, accusing the British of exploiting caste as part of its policy of divide and rule. Gandhi forced the issue into the open for the first time. He declared that untouchables should be called Harijans, which means “children of God.” The media photographed him eating from banana-leaf plates among untouchables in their slums, a shocking image because he hailed from an upper-caste family. Interdining between the castes was extremely rare.

The untouchable leader B. R. Ambedkar thought these gestures patronizing, though. He was an unusual man: Born into a family whose hereditary work was cleaning toilets and guarding the bodies of the dead, he became the first untouchable to be educated overseas. On his return to India, Ambedkar rose into national politics, advocating radical social revolution and hoping India’s new democracy would itself overthrow the caste system. Ambedkar shared Gandhi’s goals of self-rule and self-reliance for India, but he didn’t believe it would happen within the Hindu framework. Gandhi, as a privileged caste Hindu, had no right to speak for untouchables, he said—or to name them. He rejected the name Harijan, preferring to describe himself as a Dalit, which means “downtrodden” or “broken to pieces.” His is the term that stuck.

Ambedkar, a lawyer, was the lead author of India’s 1950 constitution, which made it illegal to discriminate against untouchables. More than fifty years later, when I’d moved to India, I still saw caste everywhere. Intercaste marriage was officially legal, for instance, but it was regularly prevented or punished by families wielding their own system of justice. In ancient times, high-caste Hindus believed there were terrible mental and physical consequences to being touched by the people who cleaned toilets and skinned cows. One scholar of Hinduism compares this fear of pollution to Americans’ terror about people with HIV at the height of the AIDS panic. Hindus who defile their high-caste status—by killing an animal of any kind or sharing a drinking vessel with a low-caste person—were supposed to purify themselves with what Manu called “expiatory penances” such as begging for food and bathing three times a day.

At school, Ambedkar was forced to drink from a separate untouchables cup, into which water was poured from a height to protect the server from being contaminated by the vessel. Dalits still drink from a separate well in some villages. In ancient times, they were obliged to announce their arrival by clapping together the soles of their shoes to avoid contaminating the higher castes. In some parts of today’s India, Dalits are forced to hold their
chappals
in their hands when they walk past high-caste houses, so as not to pollute the path. Although interdining is now common in cafés and restaurants in Delhi and Mumbai, the highest and lowest castes almost never share meals in rural areas, let alone align their lives in any more intimate ways, such as marrying into each other’s families.

Ambedkar was the first to warn that good laws alone wouldn’t end caste discrimination. India would “enter a life of contradictions” when the constitution came into effect, he said, because “in politics we will have equality.… How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?”

It’s a question that could be asked today. India’s new economy makes merit-based social mobility possible as never before, but caste discrimination is old and deep. It is built into every institution and impulse in India, as was racism in the pre–Civil War American South. If it is difficult for an outsider to have an honest conversation about race in the Dixie states, the same is true about caste in India. It’s not that these conversations don’t take place, but even in private they are veiled in platitudes and spoken in hushed tones.

When I brought up caste, progressive-minded intellectuals, economists, and politicians would fiercely resist the comparison to slavery and racism. In the mainstream narrative of India’s economic and social uplift, there is no room for India’s deep-rooted system of discrimination based on birthright.

“Caste was a problem in the old India, but now things have changed,” they’d say, or “It’s been solved in the cities. It is only an issue in villages now.” I’d usually keep quiet, for the sake of holding on to a source or avoiding an argument about a topic I was scarcely an expert in, but I didn’t believe them. Globalization and urbanization just paper
over caste—they haven’t eradicated it. In my own apartment in the capital city of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, my two servants lived out the most basic inequities of the caste system every day.

As I packed up my radio equipment, Vijay apologized for barely allowing me to get a question in.

“I get
too too
passionate about this subject. We should have a calmer discussion sometime. Why don’t you come and meet some friends at the Delhi Press Club this weekend. I think you’ll like my friend Parvati.”

I didn’t need convincing. I was so starved for social activity that I didn’t care whether he ranted all night about caste, cricket, or Bollywood dance moves. Nighttime activities had proved surprisingly difficult in Delhi. Everyone from Joginder to my taxi driver, K.K., recited the same foreboding counsel: “Single ladies should not be venturing outside after dark.” The newspapers regularly chronicled incidents of “eve-teasing,” the Indian euphemism that has its root in the biblical story of Eve and that makes sexual harassment sound much less serious than it is. In fact, government statistics show that violence against women has actually risen since 2003. Probably due to more women entering the workplace and other public spaces, rape cases rose by more than 30 percent; kidnapping or abduction cases increased by over 50 percent. Geeta had her own stories of being “harassed by village boys,” as she put it, on public buses and even in temples.